Denisoff's novel Dog Years portrays AIDS as a cultural and linguistic metaphor with a narrator who has been diagnosed as HIV-positive. "Denisoff," wrote Daniel Gawthrop in a 1991 review, "offers neither an earnest, matter-of-fact journal of AIDS horror nor a tale of pathos and longing for loved ones." The narrator lives in Kiev, free of ideology, with an Russian student Marina and her brother Larion, with whom he fall in love. A teacher and editor, Denisoff studied for his Ph.D. at both McGill and UBC. He has studied at the Kiev Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages, has offered workshops about Russian folktales and is knowledgeable about contemporary Russian literature. Denisoff has co-edited Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence and edited Queeries: An Anthology of Gay Male Prose (Arsenal Pulp, 1993), the first such collection of its kind in Canada. It features 26 writers "whose queerness is central to their work, and whose work is central to their lives as gay men." Contributors included Stuart Blackley, Peter Dickinson, Stan Persky and David Watmough. In the early 1990s Denisoff took a position at Ryerson University teaching gender and sexuality studies. He has also written a critical study, Aestheticism and Sexual Parody, 1840-1940. According to the publisher: "From W. S. Gilbert's drama and Vernon Lee and Christopher Isherwood's prose to George du Maurier's cartoons and Max Beerbohm's caricatures, Dennis Denisoff explores the parodies' interactions with the personae and texts of canonical authors such as Alfred Tennyson, Walter Pater, Algernon Swinburne, and Oscar Wilde. In doing so, he considers the impact that these interactions had on modern ideas of gender, sexuality, taste and politics."

BOOKS:

Dog Years (Arsenal Pulp, 1991)
Tender Agencies (Arsenal Pulp, 1994)
Aestheticism and Sexual Parody, 1840-1940 (Cambridge University Press, 2001)

[BCBW 2003] "Fiction"